John Western,
Professor, Maxwell Professor of Teaching Excellence

jcwester@maxwell.syr.edu

Ph. D., UCLA, 1978
M. A., University of Western Ontario, 1972
B. A., Oxford University (UK), 1968



"...in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle"

Crossing from Labrador, July 2002

Recent News! John has been awarded the Wrigley-Fairchild award of the American Geographical Society for the best article published during the three-year period of volumes 89 through 91 of The Geographical Review.

The article in question is "Africa is Coming to the Cape."

John Western has received the Distinguished Teaching Honors of the Association of American Geographers for 2003.

Academic Appointments
1993-present, Professor of Geography, Syracuse University
1984-93, Associate Professor of Geography, Syracuse University
1978-84, Assistant Professor, Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia
1977-78, Visiting Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University

Most Recent Publication
Review of Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, in The Professional Geographer, 56, 2, 304-306 (May 2004).

Principal Publications
Outcast Cape Town (2nd edition, with new Prologue and Epilogue; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).

A Passage to England: Barbadian Londoners Speak of Home (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: London, University College Press, 1992).

Outcast Cape Town (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1981).

Rivers: Midstream and Crestline, in S. Harrison, S. Pile, and N. Thrift, editors, Patterned Ground, London: Reaktion (2004): 80-82
.
Africa is Coming to the Cape, Geographical Review, 91,4 (October 2001  [2002]): 617-640.

Qualitative Research and the Language Trap, Area, 28, 2 (1996).

A Heap of Broken Images, Research & Exploration,10,1 (1994 ).

Ambivalent Attachments to Place in London : Twelve Barbadian Families, Society & Space,11, 2 (1993).

Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 78, 1988: 211-228.(with Steven Frenkel).

Undoing the Colonial City?, Geographical Review, Vol. 75, 1985: 335-357.

Research interests
John's interests range broadly across social, cultural, political, and urban geography, with a particular interest in qualitative methods. For a number of years he helped create and team-teach trans-disciplinary lower-division social science courses in the Maxwell School. He has won a number of teaching awards, in 1993 was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1999 was designated a Maxwell Professor of Teaching Excellence. From 1997 through 2000 he was Resident Director of Syracuse University's Division of International Programs Abroad program in Strasbourg, France, and then from 2000 through 2003 served as Chair of Department.

In the last seven years professional travels have taken him throughout Europe and also to South Africa. Having lived in the latter country in the mid to late 1970s, he returned in the summer of 1996, after a 16-year absence, in order to update his 1981 book Outcast Cape Town, which documented apartheid's effect upon that city. A new paperback edition of the book, with the addition of a Prologue and an Epilogue both composed of his post-apartheid observations of 1996, was published by the University of California Press in 1997. Progress in Human Geography featured it in their "Classics Revisited" series in 1999.

Accorded a six-month sabbatical in Spring Semester 2004, John spent it fieldworking in Strasbourg, which means he has spent 50 months living there over the past several years. From the rich qualitative material provided by 111 open-ended interviews, John's project is now to write a work on the complex historico-cultural human geography of that city as revealed in living memory. (Among others, two centenarians were interviewed.)

Patricia King and he are raising Charlie (14) and Grace (9). The picture was taken at Yellowstone in July 2001.